STEPHANIE FLOWER PhD: Inaugural Doctoral Lecture: '‘Don’t tell me I have a voice when I haven’t’: Prescribed approaches to Curricula in Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs)'

Description

Multi-academy trusts (MATs) are the preferred providers of state education in England, with legal responsibility for running multiple schools across multiple sites, irrespective of location. While referred to as families of schools (Department for Education, 2021), schools need not have anything in common other than a shared executive team. While it has been reported that most MATs offer freedoms to their schools (Department for Education, 2022), MATs are not required to share this level of detail, meaning that the extent of this remains unknown. Revealed, however, is that a strong MAT might choose to adopt highly centralised approaches, to include curricula, to facilitate consistency across a group of schools (Ofsted, 2022).

During her inaugural talk, Dr. Stephanie Flower will share some findings from her PhD research, which focused on prescribed curricula within the primary schools of MATs, examined through a neoliberal lens. Rather than being a panacea for teacher workload, it was found that MAT-devised curricula premised on a one-size-fits-all model evidenced a disregard for teachers' situational expertise and constituted an unsuitable proxy for teaching and learning. Maintaining that teachers should be actively engaged in meaningful discussions over matters that affect their practice, Stephanie will celebrate examples of where teachers' agency was identified and what we can learn from these.

Period	10 Jun 2025
Event type	Exhibition
Location	Northampton, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International